


easy like sunday mornings

by tentaclemonster



Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [39]
Category: Night Film - Marisha Pessl
Genre: 100 Fandoms Challenge, Age Difference, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, F/M, M/M, Multi, OT3, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:28:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22223323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentaclemonster/pseuds/tentaclemonster
Summary: Nora is an early riser, Scott is a light sleeper, and Hopper wouldn’t wake up even if you set a bomb off right next to his ear.
Relationships: Scott McGrath/Nora Halliday/Hopper Cole
Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [39]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1257083
Kudos: 4
Collections: The 100 Multifandom Challenge





	easy like sunday mornings

**Author's Note:**

> 39/100 for the 100 Fandoms Challenge. Written for prompt #82 – time.

Scott was pulled out of his sleep with all the sudden jarring shock of a car accident – minus a few notable differences, obviously, like how instead of a transfer truck slamming face-first into the driver’s side door he got a bony knee in the ribs or how instead of being smothered and suffocated via airbag he got a mouth full of long hair; hair that he choked on, then sputtered out, and then still somehow felt like his mouth was still full of even though he knew it wasn’t, couldn’t have been, or else he wouldn’t have been able to mumble out the mildly alarmed, still slurred from sleep question –  _ “Wha’sgoingon?” _ – that came out of his mouth more easily than the hair did.

“Sorry!” Nora’s voice came in a stage whisper back. “ _ So _ sorry! Just go back to sleep!”

Scott, half-way back to sleep already at the sound of a familiar voice despite his abrupt pull out of it, thought that was a grand idea. An idea he would have followed through on had Nora’s apology not been instantly undercut by her body fumbling over him, jostling the bed in a clumsy attempt to crawl out that included the twin knee to the first one that nabbed him in the ribs giving Scott a good, hard  _ bang _ right in his gut, a hit that hurt enough to drag a grunt from his throat and had lower parts of him preemptively aching in alarm at how close  _ they’d _ been to that one.

Sleep, so close before, now fled like a cockroach on the dinner table the second the kitchen light was turned on and the realization that sleep wouldn’t be coming back any time  _ soon _ crept over Scott’s brain with as many legs and as much unnatural speed as any creepy crawler ever had.

Somewhere, a few feet away, Scott could hear Nora making extreme effort to quietly go about her business which – because Nora was Nora – was a small cacophony of small sounds, lots of rustles and flutters and footsteps, all of which was not very quiet at all when put together. 

Scott sighed, adding his own sound to the mix, and opened his eyes. He pushed himself up to his elbows and blinked with squinted eyes at the light coming in from the bedroom window, light that was so much dimmer than the brighter light he was used to seeing at the time of morning he preferred to wake up that it felt like it may as well be the light of a foreign sun on another planet. 

He almost made the observation out loud. Nora would laugh at it, probably, tease him about how much he liked to sleep in and explain to him not for the first time the reasons why her early bird hours were infinitely superior to the hours he kept, all the while knowing his internal clock would never be perfectly in sync with hers.

His tongue stayed, though, when he turned his gaze away from the window to actually look at Nora and he found himself caught – sight hopelessly stuck to the look of her in that white nightgown she loved so much as she stood rummaging through her clothes, her hair now in a single loose braid that reached down to her hip, the early morning light soft and pale and extenuating everything lovely about her.

She looked beautiful in this light, enchanting, and – Scott noted with a twinge of discomfort that was a familiar visitor to him but slowly, over time, becoming less and less so – also incredibly young.

He couldn’t help glancing down at the bed next to him, then, out of some force of habit or inner need to compare. 

Hopper lay sprawled on his back, sleeping with one arm cradled over his bare chest and the other at an odd angle over his head that looked uncomfortable to Scott but apparently didn’t bother Hopper at all since he was still sleeping, seemingly unbothered by anything – his head was tilted to one side of his pillow, his face with its last tinges of the tan he brought back from South America months before totally slack with his own sleep that hadn’t been interrupted a bit when Nora woke up between them and made her jostling extraction out of bed. 

No knees had jammed into  _ his _ ribs, clearly, but Scott doubted Hopper would have woken up even if they had. Scott used to think that Hopper’s tendency to sleep so deeply was a result of alcohol and god knew what else mixed with it, but two years after their first meeting he now knew that even when sober nothing short of a nuclear bomb being dropped on Hopper’s head would wake him up before he was good and ready.

And a sleeping Hopper, like an awake Nora, also looked years younger than he actually was. The lines around his eyes dissolved, the furrow of his brows loosened, the tenseness he carried around his mouth relaxed. He was handsome when he was awake, but sleep took some of the strikingness out of it. It gentled it, made it soft the same way the morning light made Nora look so soft now, and that softness made him look younger the same way the edge he had about himself when he was awake made him look older.

Unlike his observation of Nora, though, this observation of Hopper didn’t cause Scott any twinge of discomfort to speak of. Hopper’s age, the difference between it and Scott’s  _ own _ age, never had. While plenty of things had given Scott pause about folding Hopper, newly returned to New York and slotting back into things with ease, into his relationship with Nora (which was quite newly returned and quite newly non-platonic  _ itself _ ), his age had never been one of them while Nora’s age  _ had _ given him a pause – or two or a few.

When Scott bothered to think about it, he figured it was a side-effect of being a father to daughter, and when Scott bothered to think about it, he never thought about it for long because that train of thought lead to comparing Nora to Sam or wondering what he’d do if Sam, at twenty or twenty one or twenty  _ anything _ , ever brought home a boyfriend that was Scott’s age and neither of those trains were ones that Scott was very eager to board. 

Scott also never shared these thoughts out  _ loud _ , particularly not with Nora because while accidental knees to the gut were painful enough, he was sure that a purposeful knee would hurt all the more and Nora would aim to injure much lower than a  _ rib _ if she felt that she was being patronized, a thing she felt often if anyone ever implied she was too young to do or feel whatever she set her mind to.

Now, though, all Nora seemed to be injuring was whatever semblance of order their bedroom seem to have. She rummaged through drawers of her own clothes like a burglar would – searching, like she was looking for something valuable but had no clue where it was even though she was the one who put everything in its place herself.

Whatever discomfort Scott felt faded as he watched her, lips twitching at the little scowl on her face that formed when she held up a particularly toxic neon green colored scarf and summarily tossed it over her shoulder like yesterday’s bad news.

“Looking for the secret to life in there?” Scott asked. He kept his voice low out habit, a lifetime of unspoken lessons about how to behave around sleeping people or in the early morning hours, both subjects that seemed to demand quiet as much as libraries or funerals did even though there was little chance of waking Hopper and Nora wasn’t likely to complain if Scott spoke a little louder.

Nora shut the drawer she’d been searching with a loud thud and Hopper, dead to the world, didn’t so much as twitch next to Scott at the sound, both of them aptly proving his point.

“Only if the meaning of life is my pink knit cap,” Nora said, sighing. She walked back over to the bed and threw herself down on Scott’s chest, making him let out an  _ oof _ even as his hand automatically came up to rest on her hair. 

Nora shifted against him, got comfortable, settled. The warm weight of her was helping him shake off whatever lingering regret he had over being awake so early, replacing it with ideas of things he wouldn't mind doing at such a stark hour, things even more attractive than just going back to sleep, things that reminded him he didn’t have anything on under the sheets.

“Think I missed the gaudy knitwear lesson back when I was taking Philosophy 101,” Scott said dryly. His hand ran down Nora’s hair, lower and lower until it rested at her hip and his fingers were painting little circles into the light fabric of her nightie. “Check the dryer?”

Scott regretted saying it the moment he made the suggestion. He could practically  _ see _ the light bulb go off over her head, a head that popped up instantly from his chest to look at him through narrowed eyes.

“Dryer?” she asked, the same way a pirate might ask  _ ‘treasure?’ _ . 

Scott sighed but nodded and Nora leaped off of him with surprising speed, rushing out of the room presumably to find the elusive pink hat and leaving Scott with only fading traces of her warmth against his skin and a persistent hard-on under the covers. 

Still, though, he had a little hope – hope that grew when Nora came back, pink hat firmly on her head, and immediately took off her nightie, and then plummeted when she then began to  _ get dressed _ , the opposite of how Scott wanted the next few minutes to play out.

He groaned loudly and flopped back down on the bed, relieving his elbows from holding up his weight. 

“I gotta tell ya, I’m not liking the look of this, Bernstein,” Scott said with mock disapproval. 

Nora had pulled on black leggings with rainbows printed all over them and a knee-length skirt that was made of some shiny plastic-y fabric as candy pink as her hat, and was in the process of pulling an oversized white hoodie with black splotches on it to make it look like a panda’s face over her head. 

“There’s no such thing as too much pink,” she said gravely – a statement she topped by dragging a pair of glittery pink rainboots out to shove one foot into followed by the other.

Scott shot a quick glance at the window again, confirmed what he thought he saw before – that there was no rain – and turned back to look at Nora who was throwing her phone into her bag, a sure sign that she was seconds away from heading out the door.

“We’ll postpone the first battle of World War III for later, thank you. I meant that it’s  _ Sunday _ ,” he stressed thee word. “It’s illegal to be up this early on one of the few days of the week meant entirely for  _ rest _ .” 

Nora shot him a raised brow and volleyed back, “Catholic Mass, Woodward. 5 a.m. at like a thousand churches in the city every Sunday morning. Look it up.”

Scott shot her an incredulous look back. “You’re going to  _ Mass? _ ” 

“No, I’m going to  _ Bakes _ . Josephine texted me, she needs someone to fill in this morning.”

“Okay, getting up for cupcakes at 5 a.m. is  _ slightly _ more understandable than getting up at the crack of dawn for Jesus, but still –  _ Sunday. _ ”

She laughed, the emphasis lost on her, and crossed the room just long enough to lean down and press a kiss on his cheek that lingered, her lips close enough to his mouth and her body leaning over his in such a way that it all felt like a promise of more to come but – 

As quickly as she’d crossed the room, Nora was flitting away again and shooting a devious,  _ knowing, _ smile over her shoulder at Scott as she headed out.

“I’ll bring cupcakes back!” she promised brightly. 

“Well – you do that!” Scott yelled back, bereft, and then only caught the beginnings of another laugh before he heard the sound of the front door closing behind her, the laughter going out the other side of it.

Scott sighed, a horribly  _ fond  _ sound, and looked down at the tent in his sheets with regret. He looked over next to him at Hopper – wonderfully handsome and also still woefully  _ asleep _ – and was tempted to wake him, but as deep as Hopper could sleep, he was also a hell of a bear if you  _ did _ manage to wake him up before he wanted, and not in a way that Scott would like right now.

Scott sighed again, the sound a little less than fond and more exasperated, and pulled the sheets back over his head. 

It really was too early for anything.


End file.
